María C. Gaztambide

Documents of 20th-century Latin American and Latino Art: A Digital Archive and Publications Project is a multiyear initiative at the International Center for the Arts of the ...
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Documents of 20th-century Latin American and Latino Art: A Digital Archive and Publications Project is a multiyear initiative at the International Center for the Arts of the Americas (ICAA) of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston that seeks to consolidate Latin American and Latino art as a field of study and to place it on equal footing with other established aesthetic traditions. It encompasses the recovery, translation into English, and publication of primary texts by Latin American and Latino artists, critics, and curators who have played a fundamental role in the development of modern and contemporary art in countries or communities throughout the Americas. The ICAA makes these essential bibliographic materials available free of charge through a digital archive and a series of fully annotated book anthologies published in English. It is facilitating new historical scholarship on 20th-century Latin American and Latino art through a framework of thirteen open-ended editorial categories that center on thematic rather than more traditional chronological guidelines. This approach broadens the discourse on the modern and contemporary art produced along this cultural axis. A discussion and contextualization of a selection of recovered documents that relate to the editorial category of “Resisting Categories: Latin American and/or Latino?” supports this central argument. These and other little-known or previously inaccessible primary source and critical materials will ultimately encourage interdisciplinary and transnational (re)readings of how aesthetics, social issues, and artistic tendencies have been contested and developed in the region.

Beatriz Polivanov

This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History. Please check back later for the full article.
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This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History. Please check back later for the full article.

The burgeoning digital technologies of the early twenty-first century are rapidly changing and engrossing millions of people across the globe. YouTube and Facebook are but two examples of social network sites (SNSs) whose social implications are so vast they deserve concerted research. The artifacts, the media, and their implications call for study within specific social and cultural contexts, for their uses and appropriations vary considerably and can suggest different meanings.

Ethnographic research, begun in 2008, follows people connected to electronic music (e-music) in the largest urban centers of Brazil, namely São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. This study traces the migration of this social group from Orkut (which was at that time the most popular SNS in Brazil, by far) to Facebook, which continues to increase in popularity.

The complex topic of learning how people use social media to build their identities is especially interesting. The utilization of terms such as “identity performance,” “self-presentation,” or “self-representation” may denote radically different approaches to the “phenomenon.” Moreover, a methodological concern arises: It is important to gather data concerning people’s use of Facebook, and this should be done online. Nevertheless, it is also relevant to carry out direct interviews to better understand the dynamics of individuals’ self-performance. This fuels debates about the appropriate “adaptation” of ethnographic methods and techniques to virtual environments.

This ethnographic research evaluates concepts such as “virtual ethnography” and “netnography” that have been used to differentiate off-line and online research methods. This line of research argues that although there are specific characteristics of the computer-mediated communication regarding interaction and particular languages for research “in” and “outside” the Internet, such communication takes place in environments that should no longer be treated as “non-places,” or in terms of “real” versus “virtual” as some approaches suggest; rather these spaces should be viewed as a continuum.

In 2012, in-depth, face-to-face interviews were conducted with five social actors from the e-music scenes mentioned above. The questions were informed by review of both the literature on identity construction in SNSs and that on ethnographic methods applied in digital contexts. The interviews were combined with a close observation of the Facebook profiles of these same people.

The study found that the processes of self-presentation of these social actors on Facebook are linked to the daily performance of certain aspects of their identities—mostly related to music as a way of self-expression—for specific “imagined audiences.” The interviewees carefully manage the impressions they want to create for their connections, trying to maintain or break a supposed “expressive coherence” of their online and off-line selves, hence restoring regimes of visibility and identity construction in contemporary times.

Felipe Morales Leal and Lourdes Roca

The Laboratorio Audiovisual de Investigación Social (Social Research Audiovisual Lab, or LAIS) at the Instituto Mora in Mexico has worked in both audiovisual production and the study of ...
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The Laboratorio Audiovisual de Investigación Social (Social Research Audiovisual Lab, or LAIS) at the Instituto Mora in Mexico has worked in both audiovisual production and the study of the visual world in which we live today. Constructing research sources from photographic images and audiovisual materials constitutes its fundamental purpose. Research methodologies that incorporate images are its plan of action and reflection, and along with the ongoing construction of alternatives, they are put into practice in diverse types of products that result in human resource training with specialized courses and workshops.

With the ultimate goal of promoting research that uses and disseminates images and audiovisual materials, LAIS has numerous research documentaries in its collection, a Website with photographic libraries, projects with an array of public interest products, publications in both digital and print format, and information technology development for the online publication of research tools, as well as specialized workshops and courses on the subject. An important reference at the Latin American level for years, the Instituto Mora’s Social Research Audiovisual Lab drives the expansion of each of these resources.

Stephanie Wood

Mesoamerica is a culture zone that stretches geographically from approximately north-central Mexico into the northwestern half of Central America. Human occupation of this region dates ...
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Mesoamerica is a culture zone that stretches geographically from approximately north-central Mexico into the northwestern half of Central America. Human occupation of this region dates back thousands of years. The end of the Post-Classic Period (c. 1519) is marked by the invasion of the region by Europeans, who were looking to extract goods, services, and taxes from the Mesoamerican peoples. Spanish occupation stretched into the early 19th century. Neocolonial Mesoamerica, of the 19th and 20th centuries, came to experience increasing influences from the United States, Britain, Germany, and other external powers. The past two centuries have also been marked by a continuing local control by a minority, Euro-originating elite over a majority, indigenous population, even as what we once knew as Mesoamerica faded from view. The division between these ethnicities has grown somewhat less clear as a result of the increasing mixed-heritage mestizo or ladino population across the region. Authoritarian regimes marked much of the 20th century, and civilian rule (still without much or any indigenous participation) came at the end of that century, continuing up to the present. But police and military authorities remain present, concerned with internal dissent and unrest at least as much as external threats.

For the present purposes, Digital Mesoamerica has as its focus the region’s indigenous cultures and their histories. Shared cultural traits in the pre-contact era—such as the calendars, glyphic writing, the ball court, human sacrifice, certain legends and religious beliefs, agricultural methods, art, and technologies—set off the many peoples of Mesoamerica from other parts of the Americas. The history of the culture zone is rich for exploring the rise of civilizations, social, economic, and political systems, gender ideologies and practices, religions, land tenure and agricultural systems, medicine, mathematics, astronomy, calendrics, and language diversity (among many other themes). Colonization and its dimensions—such as the impact of epidemic disease, the nature of hybrid religions, evolving tribute and labor systems, struggles over land, efforts to defend some measure of local autonomy, and more—is another arena of great scholarly interest. Contemporary studies are marked by human rights and cultural survival issues, ethnography, mining and other environmental crises, and fair trade, among many other topics.

The most popular and numerous digital resources supporting research and teaching related to Mesoamerican cultures and their histories tend to center on indigenous-authored manuscripts and maps, some of them pre-contact and most of them colonial. These sources are located primarily in Mexican, Guatemalan, U.S., and European repositories, where institutional funds are supporting the creation of open-access digital collections of such materials, along with audio demonstrating language use, videos of all kinds, educational units, and photographs of three-dimensional cultural heritage materials. We are also witnessing moves toward the aggregation of digital content across multiple repositories, such as we see with the World Digital Library, the Internet Archive, and the Getty Research Portal, among others, which increasingly represent Mesoamerica along with other regions of the world. Individuals are also submitting their full-text publications to such aggregators as Academia.edu, announcing their public talks and publications on listservs, Twitter, and Facebook pages, or creating their own robust, one-of-a-kind Web-based projects (with funding from host institutions or national endowments).

Linda Arnold

Researchers in major Mexico City archives in the early 1970s had access to very few finding aids for historical documents and record sets. Since then, archivists and researchers have ...
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Researchers in major Mexico City archives in the early 1970s had access to very few finding aids for historical documents and record sets. Since then, archivists and researchers have worked diligently to organize record sets and create catalogues for an untold number of documents. Since the early twenty-first century, researchers in the Archivo General de la Nación, the Archivo Histórico de la Ciudad de México, the Archivo Histórico del Arzobispado de México, the Archivo Histórico de la Secretaría de la Defensa Nacional, and the Archivo General de Notarías have been able to access databases, searchable PDF catalogues, and a small array of digital collections.

Work toward inventorying and cataloguing record sets began long before the development of technologies available today. Typescript catalogues for record sets in the Archivo Histórico de la Ciudad de México date from the 1920s. Work on inventories, card catalogues, typescripts, and published catalogues for record sets in the Archivo General de la Nación and the Archivo Histórico de la Secretaría de la Defensa Nacional began during the 1930s and 1940s. Work on cataloguing the documents in the Archivo General de Notarías and the Archivo Histórico del Arzobispado de México began during the 1980s and 1990s. Since the early twenty-first century researchers have been able to access databases, searchable PDF catalogues, and a limited number of digitized documents for all these major archives.

New technologies began to make digitization possible, and thus Mexican libraries, along with archives, began to digitize primary and secondary sources. Some of those projects involve digitizing microfilm; others involve digitizing complete record sets and printed books. Still others involve transcriptions of historical documents. While the scope and quality of those projects vary from institution to institution, all create heretofore unimaginable access to historical documents.

Joanne Harwood, Valerie Fraser, and Sarah J. Demelo

This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History. Please check back later for the full article.
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This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History. Please check back later for the full article.

The Essex Collection of Art from Latin America (ESCALA) was originally founded as the University of Essex Collection of Latin American Art (UECLAA) in 1993, but, with no permanent display space, a versatile online presence has been essential to its success as a resource for students, curators, and researchers. By about the year 2000 it comprised around 400 works from about 10 different countries.

While it is important to remember that viewing a work of art onscreen is no substitute for viewing it firsthand, the digital catalogue is an essential aspect of ESCALA’s activities. It can offer resources that a paper catalogue cannot (it can provide a record of an artist’s performance, for example), it serves as a versatile resource for teaching and research, and it generates interest in the field among those who happen upon it through random searches.

Victoria Lyall

Launched in 1997, FAMSI.org established itself as the leading digital platform for the promotion and dissemination of Mesoamerican scholarship to the widest possible audience. The online ...
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Launched in 1997, FAMSI.org established itself as the leading digital platform for the promotion and dissemination of Mesoamerican scholarship to the widest possible audience. The online arm of the Foundation for the Advancement of Mesoamerican Studies, Inc., a nonprofit pledged to foster increased understanding of ancient Mesoamerican cultures, FAMSI.org crosscut disciplinary divisions and facilitated communication between scholars in the United States and those in Latin America. The eight-member Board of Directors and its advisory committee ensured that the foundation would harness the spirit of generosity and creativity that characterized the early days of the Internet for the benefit of a likewise emergent discipline. As the Website developed, FAMSI sought partnerships with and contributions from institutions around the world in order to make educational resources publicly available. The Website hosts a remarkable amount of primary research material, including image databases, contemporary and historical indigenous-language dictionaries, ethnographic videos, maps, and an up-to-date, searchable subject-specific bibliography, all of which are available in both English and Spanish and accessible at no cost to visitors.

Between 1997 and 2006, the Website grew exponentially, but like many of its early counterparts, the site’s utility and navigability ultimately suffered as a result of the rapid development of new software and the obsolescence of existing digital platforms; searches became sluggish and unwieldy. While visitorship remained high for an academic site—over a million unique visitors a year—a 2012 survey indicated that scholars frequented only known parts of the site while novice users spent as little as a few minutes on the site. The global economic crisis of 2008 destabilized FAMSI’s funding, and in 2010 the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) assumed stewardship of the foundation as well as the Website. The museum began to maintain and review FAMSI.org, ultimately deciding to update and transform the Website into a new platform, AncientAmericas.org, which broadens the scope beyond that of Mesoamerica. FAMSI, with its dedication to research and online collaboration, became the principal resource for the research of ancient American cultures for both a scholarly and general audience beginning in the mid-1990s. Its enduring legacy is the spirit of interdisciplinary and international cooperation and generosity that it fostered.

Catherine Davies

This research project investigates women’s involvement in the struggles to achieve political independence in Spanish America and Brazil during the first half of the 19th century. The ...
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This research project investigates women’s involvement in the struggles to achieve political independence in Spanish America and Brazil during the first half of the 19th century. The project is hosted at the University of Nottingham, Department of Spanish, Portuguese, and Latin American Studies, School of Cultures, Languages, and Area Studies; it was funded by the University of Nottingham and the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) between 2001 and 2014. The online searchable database was a core output of the first of these AHRC-funded projects (2001–2006): “Gendering Latin American Independence: Women’s Political Culture and the Textual Construction of Gender 1790–1850.” It was enhanced in stages with an AHRC Pilot Dissemination Award (2006–2007) and Follow-on Funding (2012) for the crowd-sourcing project “Women and Independence in Latin America: A New Multimedia Community–Contributed, Community-Driven Online Resource” in collaboration with the Horizon Digital Economy Institute, University of Nottingham.

The aim of the follow-on-funding awards was to stimulate widespread public debate, preferably in collaboration with partners (national and international). This was of particular importance with respect to the involvement of Latin American women in the independence wars against Spain and Portugal, an aspect of women’s history that had been much neglected. Since 2006, a lively public debate has emerged about women’s involvement in the wars of independence, especially in Latin America. The debate has focused on women’s exclusion from mainstream nationalist historiography and their problematic position in postindependence politics and public culture. The unprecedented surge of interest in women’s history and the founding discourses of the Spanish American republics has been triggered by the bicentenary celebrations of Spanish American political independence, which began in 2010 and will continue into the 2020s, and the recent rise to political prominence of women in Latin America (women presidents in Brazil, Costa Rica, Chile, and Argentina).

The research project of 2001–2006 focused more specifically on the constructions of gender categories in the culture of the independence period and the impact of war and conflict on women’s lives, social relationships, and cultural production. The research emphasized the significance of women in the independence process and explored the reasons for their subsequent exclusion from political culture until recently. Independence was examined in terms of gender: (a) the study of women’s political culture, (b) women’s activities and writings, and (c) the textual construction of gender in political discourse. Questions were posed: Did the wars of independence change traditional ways of thinking about women, and change women’s views of themselves? How was the category “woman” produced historically and politically in Spanish America at the time? In what ways were those identified as women constructed ambiguously as subjects and objects in political discourse? What were women’s responses to the republican discourse of individual rights that equated individuality with masculinity? Why, after political independence, were political rights still denied to over half the population according to the criterion of sexual difference?

Jonathan Saxon

The Getty Research Institute (GRI) has an extensive collection of online digital resources, with two portals that focus on Mexico. The first portal discussed in this article is A Nation ...
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The Getty Research Institute (GRI) has an extensive collection of online digital resources, with two portals that focus on Mexico. The first portal discussed in this article is A Nation Emerges: Sixty-five Years of Photography in Mexico, and the second portal discussed is Obsidian Mirror-Travels: Refracting Mexican Art and Archaeology. These portals are the online versions of GRI exhibitions. Viewers of A Nation Emerges: Sixty-five Years of Photography in Mexico will find numerous primary sources, mostly photographs, related to major historical events from 1857 to 1923. This will serve as a useful resource for scholars and students interested in photohistory. The online exhibition Obsidian Mirror-Travels: Refracting Mexican Art and Archaeology offers a wealth of online digitized images related to Aztec art, culture, and archaeology.

Although A Nation Emerges: Sixty-five Years of Photography in Mexico contains superb resources, the site is difficult to navigate and can result in viewers missing much of what it offers. Therefore, this article provides a road map of sorts with the goal of helping scholars and students save valuable time during the research process. This guide will greatly streamline the user experience for those navigating A Nation Emerges: Sixty-five Years of Photography in Mexico. In fact, readers may want to consider having access to this article while they are navigating the particular portal.

On the other hand, viewers will find Obsidian Mirror-Travels: Refracting Mexican Art and Archaeology much easier to navigate. As such, a general overview, rather than a detailed guide is provided for this portal to allow users to direct their research with efficiency and accuracy when navigating the site.

The article concludes with a brief discussion in the “Digitized Resources” section, of the literature, methodology, and historiography of photohistory.

Orchid Mazurkiewicz

HAPI began as a local project at Arizona State University (ASU) in 1973. Its founder, Barbara G. Valk, the librarian responsible for Latin American materials at ASU, wanted to provide an ...
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HAPI began as a local project at Arizona State University (ASU) in 1973. Its founder, Barbara G. Valk, the librarian responsible for Latin American materials at ASU, wanted to provide an index to the university’s periodical literature on the region, which was something that had been unavailable since the cessation of the OAS-sponsored Index to Latin American Periodicals in 1970. Following the success of the project, HAPI moved to the UCLA Latin American Center (now Latin American Institute) in 1976, where Valk used a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to fund further development of an annual printed edition of the index. This annual volume would continue to be published through 2008. HAPI was first searchable online via Telnet in 1991 and CD-ROM in 1992; its first website debuted in 1997. Now exclusively available online, HAPI is a self-supporting, not-for-profit publishing unit within UCLA, with subscribers (primarily university and college libraries) around the world. Free subscriptions are provided to institutions in Latin America and the Caribbean.

HAPI now contains over 300,000 citations to journal articles about Latin America, the Caribbean, and Latina/os in the United States and around the world. Articles date back to 1968 following an early retrospective indexing project to cover the gap between the last volume of the Index to Latin American Periodicals and the first volume of HAPI. Almost 400 journal titles are currently indexed and over 600 titles have been included since HAPI’s creation. Subject coverage includes the social sciences and the humanities; history titles represent the largest single subject area covered. HAPI aims to provide access to the most well-known and influential titles in Latin American studies as well as to regional titles that are less well known and often underrepresented in disciplinary indexes with limited Latin American and Caribbean content. Librarians (staff and volunteers) with relevant subject training examine each article and create bibliographic descriptions, subject headings, and keywords for multiple access points to the journal content. Searches can be carried out in English, Spanish, or Portuguese on HAPI’s trilingual website.

HAPI has provided links to the online full-text content of many of its indexed titles since 2003. At that time, with university and college libraries spending heavily on commercial databases, students and scholars were increasingly expecting easy access to the full text of journal articles, but few Latin American and Caribbean journals were included in these commercial products. With limited financial and technological resources, HAPI was unable to become a full-text publisher; instead, HAPI staff focused on tracking down and linking to the full text of the indexed journals wherever they could find it, especially in two Open Access regional databases: Mexico’s Redalyc and Brazil’s SciELO. A vibrant Open Access movement in Latin America has led to a dramatic increase in the free online availability of the region’s journals and unprecedented access to this content for scholars around the world. Over 75 percent of the Latin American journals indexed by HAPI now include links to freely available full text.

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